Yariv Levin

No minister in the government is identified with a single issue the way Yariv Levin is with the plan to overhaul the judicial system — the "judicial reform" to its supporters and the "regime coup" to its opponents. Since he unveiled it in January 2023 as justice minister and deputy prime minister, it has ignited one of the fiercest public struggles in the country's history, and on JudgeMarket the public's verdict on him is split accordingly: his supporters see him as the one restoring the balance between the branches of government, his opponents as the one undermining the independence of the courts. It is a polarized verdict, not a lukewarm one. The struggle did not subside even after the High Court of Justice struck down the law abolishing the reasonableness standard in January 2024: in March 2025 the Knesset passed the law changing the composition of the Judicial Selection Committee, which will take effect only in the next Knesset; Levin refuses to recognize Yitzhak Amit as President of the Supreme Court, and for about a year and a half he froze judicial appointments, until in May 2026 the High Court ordered him to convene the committee. The attorney general argued that by freezing the appointments he was acting unlawfully, while he presents the roughly 290 judges and registrars appointed during his tenure as a genuine revolution in appointments, and in the meantime vacant seats on the Supreme Court have remained unfilled. He came third in the Likud primary in August 2026, behind Eli Cohen and Amir Ohana, so he is placed fourth on the list for the October 27 election. Among Likud's leadership he is the most distinctly ideological figure, and because his standing rests almost entirely on a single issue, the public's assessment of him is sensitive to every turn in it: a ruling on the petitions against the committee law, the advance or stalling of the overhaul, and the election results themselves, which will determine the committee's political makeup once the law takes effect.